How to format your references using the Bulletin of Materials Science citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Bulletin of Materials Science. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author
Masood, Ehsan. 2012. Expert assessments can work if lessons are learned. Nature 490: 145.
A journal article with 2 authors
Han, Jeffrey S., and Jef D. Boeke. 2004. A highly active synthetic mammalian retrotransposon. Nature 429: 314–318.
A journal article with 3 authors
Sasai, Miwa, Melissa M. Linehan, and Akiko Iwasaki. 2010. Bifurcation of Toll-like receptor 9 signaling by adaptor protein 3. Science (New York, N.Y.) 329: 1530–1534.
A journal article with 11 or more authors
Hamilton, John T. G., W. Colin McRoberts, Frank Keppler, Robert M. Kalin, and David B. Harper. 2003. Chloride methylation by plant pectin: an efficient environmentally significant process. Science (New York, N.Y.) 301: 206–209.

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book
Bertein, Jean-Claude, and Roger Ceschi. 2013. Discrete Stochastic Processes and Optimal Filtering. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Wenning, Gregor K., and Alessandra Fanciulli, ed. 2014. Multiple System Atrophy. Vienna: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Brehmer, Marianne. 2014. PNL: Indications and Guidelines: Stenosis and Tumours. In Supine Percutaneous Nephrolithotomy and ECIRS: The New Way of Interpreting PNL, ed. Cesare Marco Scoffone, András Hoznek, and Cecilia Maria Cracco, 33–40. Paris: Springer.

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Bulletin of Materials Science.

Blog post
Andrews, Robin. 2017. Dragonfish Have A Really Freaky Way Of Opening Their Jaws. IFLScience. IFLScience. February 2.

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report
Government Accountability Office. 2013. TSA Explosives Detection Canine Program: Actions Needed to Analyze Data and Ensure Canine Teams Are Effectively Utilized. GAO-13-239. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation
Collins, Kathryn. 2014. Learning to live in the layers: Traveling soul’s way through poetry. Doctoral dissertation, Carpinteria, CA: Pacifica Graduate Institute.

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article
Nir, Sarah Maslin, Benjamin Mueller, and Mireya Navarro. 2015. A Tarnished Family Empire. New York Times, April 19.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Masood 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Han and Boeke 2004; Masood 2012).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

  • Two authors: (Han and Boeke 2004)
  • Three or more authors: (Hamilton et al. 2003)

About the journal

Full journal titleBulletin of Materials Science
ISSN (print)0250-4707
ISSN (online)0973-7669
Scope

Other styles